French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences

Céline Ségur

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030333454
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030333461
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a theoretical assessment of audience research issues. A host of contributions from French-speaking scholars question and analyse the participatory turn in media and communication research that has emerged over the last 15 years. This collection brings together high-quality theoretical and empirical contributions in order to promote scientific discussions and debates between English- and French-speaking academics. Ségur contextualizes the paradigmatic evolution of media communication, explaining how participation has become an imperative in media devices. In the first section authors explore, often critically, types of participatory media formats such as radio, television, and the internet. In the second section, authors focus on the participatory performances of audiences in public media spaces. Analysis is made of online forums, the phenomenon of lurking, and of urban spaces. This book provides viewpoints from a range of disciplines including social anthropology,information and communication sciences, and media studies.

© The Author(s) 2020

C. Ségur (ed.)French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audienceshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences: Introduction

Céline Ségur¹

(1)

Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM), Université de Lorraine, Metz, France

Céline Ségur

Email: [email protected]

Translation: Ian Margo, Teri Jones-Villeneuve & Céline Ségur

End Abstract

The idea of a book on media, participation and audiences came about following the publication of a series of seminars, studies and discussions between the members of the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM, Université de Lorraine) as part of its 2013–2017 scientific program “Faire public”. The aim of the program was to define the terminological outlines of the concept, as well as the theoretical and methodological boundaries of the subjects to which it refers.¹ Accordingly, for the editor of this book, the issue of the public in particular was handled through an epistemological approach on the one hand (Ségur 2010, 2015) and from the perspective of the performative value of audiences on the other (Dakhlia et al. 2016; Ballarini and Ségur 2018). The concept of participation thus became a new paradigm for considering the relationship of individuals to the media. Indeed, we observed the extent to which the phenomena involved in identity-building as members of a public occur today through participatory practices. A public, which John Dewey (1927) defined as a community awaiting reflexivity and self-representation, is not a given in itself. It is through practice that individuals acquire awareness of belonging to a group, as Gabriel Tarde (1901) explained with regard to readers of the press. In France, this definition was used again several years later to characterize the reception of media, television in particular. In the early 1990s, Daniel Dayan put together a selection of texts written by French- and English-speaking specialists (Ien Ang, Jérôme Bourdon, John Corner, James Curran, Peter Dahlgren, Tamar Liebes, Elihu Katz, Sonia Livingstone, Peter Lunt, Éric Macé, David Morley, Kim Schroder and Michel Souchon, among others) for publication in the journal Hermès. The texts, which were in or translated into French, were published in a special issue entitled “À la recherche du public. Réception, télévision, medias”. The publication helped initiate a theoretical assessment of media audiences, where being part of the public was considered to be both a collective experience and a performance. For these authors, being receptive to a television program means considering oneself as being invited to be part of a collective experience between the television institution and the viewers. It means “an experience of watching with, no matter how lonely the spectator may in fact be”, becoming part of “an imagined community of spectators” (see p. 47 in Dayan 2005). Daniel Cefaï and Dominique Pasquier (2003: 14) stabilized this definition of publics by explaining that they are formed by participating in a cultural, political, social or other kind of experience: “The idea of ‘publicisation’ implies that the ‘public’ is not a given in itself, either preceding or outside of the performances that concern it: it ‘publicises’ itself by ‘publicising’ a social issue or policy measure, a theatrical work or a television programme—by ‘publicising’ at the same time, manifestations of pleasure and criticism, support and disapproval, shame and indignation, justification and condemnation”.² Here, the concepts of public and experiences are closely related. This leads to the question of how to distinguish between television viewers consuming a media program and involving themselves in a public. The researchers called upon by Sonia Livingstone (2005) came to a similar conclusion: audiences are the subject of growing mediation and their activities are increasingly visible (public). Interactions between the public and private spheres are central to these issues and today serve to highlight the concept of participation.

From Reception to Participation

We began exploring this issue at a time when the communication environment had undergone a profound shift in the way in which a public is defined, a fortiori, a media public. The audiences, which were previously viewed as being on the receiving end of messages, are now considered to be at the center of the participatory situation, which takes numerous forms: spontaneous, desired, encouraged, mythologized, directed, restricted and so on. This is what led Henry Jenkins (2006) to consider that media communication in Western societies in the twenty-first century occurs through the convergence model. Participatory culture is one of the two pillars of contemporary cultural convergence. Producers and consumers of media messages must be considered as participants interacting with each other. The passive user model has changed: “It is no longer possible to proceed without the receivers or consumers of meaning, who are no longer content to react, appropriate and divert informative messages and entertainment content, but who at times may be involved as early as the production phase” (see p. 7 in Maigret 2013). In this model, we cannot talk about audiences but rather about participatory communities. Today, the media—and especially television—build audience loyalty through strategies based on formats that call for participation (“Comment live on …”, “Vote!”, “See us on …”, “Watch the replay”, etc.). The forms and formats of audience participation in media programs have always existed (viewer and listener participation, namely by phone). What is new is that the channels and producers have now made participation a key component in their production (Thornborrow 2015).

The participation of “ordinary people” in particular is now commonplace in many types of media, to which several chapters of this book can attest. In the case of television, two factors partly explain this shift. First, there has been an explosion of reality television (Nadaud-Albertini 2013) and lifestyle and dating shows (Mehl 1996) that present some or all of the intimate lives of those on the show. Second, a system based on interactions between “traditional” media and digital platforms has developed, such as social TV.³ However, it should be noted that since its inception, French television has always attempted to get to know its audiences while tightly controlling their participation. In the 1950s, the leaders of Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF, a former French national public broadcasting channel, which enjoyed a monopoly⁴) considered the public to be a means to achieve political unification and cultural democratization as well as to educate the masses (see Ségur 2019). RTF surveyed and consulted its viewers through a customer relations department (“Service des relations avec les auditeurs et les spectateurs”), which was tasked with promoting and rating the organization (see p. 208 in Bourdon 2011). Information about what television viewers thought was gathered through a few sporadic surveys (Méadel 2010),⁵ letters received by the television channel and its hosts (Poels 2015) and what viewers said on air. For example, programs such as Jeux de société (1963), which portrayed “real life” situations in a fictional way, were interspersed with interviews with viewers commenting on what they saw. Although putting television viewers on air—through interviews in the street designed to get their opinions of an event, person or even the media—was an initial and regular form of participation (Jost 1999), new formats followed. In particular, the television game shows of the 1960s and 1970s sought to capture television viewers’ visual attention, often by giving them a mystery to solve (Leveneur 2006). In the 1980s and 1990s, hosts of television programs began asking audiences to participate in the programs themselves, by offering their opinions, showing their emotions and being involved through a “compassionate pact” (Mehl 1996). Mediation services also emerged in the late 1990s, with their official role being to act as “interlocutor and interpreter of the public” for the channels (Goulet 2004). A more recent practice is to ask the public to interact during a program—reality television programs are an emblematic example of this—by voting (via texting on mobile phones) for one of the candidates or sending in a question (via Twitter) for a guest on the show. Some believe it is the development of social TV that has enabled television viewers to participate in programs, through “the creation of ‘interactive television’, which offers more possibilities to participate beyond the imaginary interactions written into the scripts of television game shows or the reactions of studio audiences. Interactive voting, which is entertaining, collective and unifying, makes use of multiple communication options (phone, texting, Internet) and brings the fantasy of modern mass media to life because it has enabled large-scale participation” (see p. 30 in Pereny and Amato 2011).

However, the participatory turn leads us to consider at least three issues. First, shall we really consider audiences’ feedback as participation? Are the multiple communication options linked to the development of transmedia experiences proposed to audiences an achieve f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences: Introduction
• Part I. Participatory Formats
• Part II. Audiences and the Public Sphere
• Back Matter